1996-05-28 Independence
I did not want to be the target of a black bag operation.
Follow the money.—Henry Peterson
On returning to Ohio, I leased a small apartment in Lakewood, set up my consulting company as a sole proprietorship, and, in between client meetings, wrote my first book. This wasn't a huge challenge, as the two software manuals I'd recently written added up to roughly the same page count. I thought it would simply be more of the same. I could do that.
The market for CAD/CAM tutorial books was just beginning to develop, and I was able to negotiate a reasonable advance from a small publisher for a book focusing on automated Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and simulation. The book did moderately well for its type, which meant that I could have made more money by working as assistant manager on closing shift for a fast-food franchise. Clearly, technical book author for a small niche was not going to be my path to fame and fortune. It did put my name in front of a few thousand people in a rather small community.
Cash flow problems caused me to take on a consulting contract that I might have otherwise avoided. The software product I had managed in Austin had been on the market for a while and had done well enough that there was perceived demand for an updated version. Gavin refused to do anything unless I was his go-between with the company. After talking it over with Gavin and with the other product engineers, I cautiously negotiated a contract that I thought would protect me from the CEO's mental short circuits. He was halfway across the continent, so I thought I'd be safe. To my amusement, Tim insisted on his personal attorney revising the contract—and the revisions were all in my favor! I did not look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
The development and production cycle went as smoothly as could be expected. I added a few ideas, Gavin did his usual amazing programming job, and I updated the documentation in a light revision pass. We made the scheduled ship date with a solid feature list, my paycheck cleared, and I thought that was the end of it.
Then I got a registered letter from a retired admiral who had once headed a major intelligence agency. The admiral accused me of contractual interference between Gavin and the software company and threatened to prosecute me. The word “arrest” was used.
What the flying monkeys was this?
I did a bit of online research. Turned out the admiral was on the board that ran the incubator and had apparently put some money into the software company. I thought the CEO had most likely been pouring poison into the admiral's ear.
When I called Gavin he explained, "Once my work was finished and the software shipped, I sent the company an email. I informed them that I will not work for them again until they have a new CEO." Gavin was clearly gleefully happy about what he'd done.
When I read him the letter, he was dismayed. "I didn't mention you at all. This is so unfair! They can't blame you when it's really all their fault!"
"No need to worry, I'll take care of this. To be honest, I'm glad you've declared your independence."
On reflection, I was appalled that someone with a long career in intelligence had been unable to determine that a sole source was unreliable and chose to take action without confirmation from multiple sources. That made it worse, as far as I was concerned. I did not want to be the target of a black bag operation.
I did what seemed logical and reasonable to me. I made a copy of my contract and highlighted and annotated the relevant passages. I drafted an extremely polite cover letter answering each of the admiral's points with references to reliable sources, and clearing up the misinformation as best I could. I sent off the package, certified mail.
I never heard back from the admiral. Or the CEO.
I am a firm believer in the value of contracts. If I had not had a clear contract covering my actions, I don't know what might have happened. As it was, I'm not sure that contract was profitable enough to compensate for the added stress.
What did turn out to be profitable was the work I completed the next year. I combined my education and experience in mechanical engineering, materials science, and software development to create a set of plug-ins for the market's dominant CAD/CAM program. My plug-ins enabled even a moderately capable user to simulate advanced materials, using automated routines that nevertheless gave reliable results through automated adaptive processes. I had managed to encode some of my own expertise and talent, and to make it usable by any moderately intelligent person. I also wrote the tutorial and reference manual.
I was extremely pleased with my work. After the initial euphoria wore off, I could get a sustaining buzz by leafing through the manual. I coded a screensaver out of my favorite plug-in demos. It never failed to bring a smile to my face.
The plug-ins proved popular, and I received a handsome buyout offer from the core program's owners. I negotiated an open-ended development agreement, in which I would have full developers' access to their product line and internal projects, and I would contribute whatever I felt like in the future, for similar compensation. In short, I had a fun playpen, and they would pay me for anything they could profit from. Everybody won.
The cherry on top was that they bundled my book with the program's deluxe and education packages. My royalties multiplied.
All together, that gave me the seed money to pretty much do as I pleased. I did write another book or two, but only incidentally, and more as a matter of documenting my research.
What I really wanted to do was develop a complete end-to-end automated CAD/CAM suite for a wide range of materials. In the late 90s, this was clearly a science fictional concept. I wanted to make it reality.
I worked on my system steadily for the next decade. Along the way I consulted a bit and taught a variety of subjects at different schools in different countries including Malaysia, Micronesia, and the UAE. University connections are useful to a researcher and teaching keeps your mind flexible if you do it properly. The cultural exposure was an interesting bonus. I learned that there were many cultures and systems radically different from my home country’s mainstream emphasis on individualism, capitalism, and (more or less) liberal democracy. Attitudes toward time, rule of law, keeping one’s word, property rights, gender and age and ethnic origin varied so widely and in so many directions that the statement that “People are pretty much the same all over” became a joke in extremely poor taste. Instead, I learned that every sustainable culture has its own checks and balances, and if you want to exist in that culture you need to work within it or to provide your own resources to work around it. I also learned that the theory or public presentation of a culture’s values is almost always very different in practice, and the actual practice is what is important to understand and is most difficult to discover.
By 2008, I had the mechanical engineering minion that I wanted. As a test case, I set it to automatically optimize any Patent Office filings that included sufficient art and which were now in the public domain, and to create 3D printable files. After a few tweaks, the process worked almost flawlessly.
My plug-in suite apparently impressed the CAD/CAM software people; they paid my asking price without a quibble. I suppose I left some money on the table that time, but I had what I wanted.
For me, the value of my plug-ins, combined with the core program and attached to state-of-the-art rapid prototyping hardware, was in the robot manufactory. I could envision a concept, bring it up in detail, test it, revise it, and produce a physical working prototype all on my own and in a very short time. This was the foundation of all my later work.
Now I didn't need to work for anyone else just to get access to laboratory equipment. I could build almost anything I needed, without human assistants, colleagues, or deep-pocketed sponsors. I finally had my independence.